A long time ago, when I was twenty-four, I wrote an intimate one-woman play. The actress needed to play four women characters in extremely unstable emotional situations. I gave it to a few actresses, to see if they would do it (I sent the manuscript one at a time, of course). One famous actress invited me to her home to talk about the play. It’s not that she wanted to take it, she said when I came, the play was too dark for her; it’s that she needed to see with her own eyes that a man wrote it and not a woman. When I was twenty-four I looked fifteen, so that no doubt made it even more jarring for her. She kept saying how she couldn’t believe a man wrote that play, that a man would know so many things about women.

I’ve been getting that reaction to my plays – and to my stories and books – ever since. I like writing about women characters. I like putting them as lead characters. I prefer it that way, in fact.

I have a new regular weekly blog at Gamasutra, a site for gamers and professionals in video game companies. The techniques of storytelling are often underused, overlooked, or ignored by game companies, which rely more on luck than on professional writers to write a good plot.

In my last ‘SF From the Rim’ article, I wrote about writing for two cultures at the same time: the English-speaking SF readers and the ‘foreign’ readers. This time I analyze the differences between the English-speaking authors and the ‘foreign’ authors.

I ran two online writing workshops in Israel. When I was done, the organizers of the forum compiled all the exercises and asked me to write a small article introducing them. The article is reprinted here.